a bilingual contribution to German

Submitted by myth (Germany), Oct 31, 2016 at 07:31

You are on to something pointing out that immigrants and their descendants bring bilingual skills to the society. I would however recommend that the bilinguals contribute to the larger society rather than isolate themselves in separate schools.

Here in Germany the Turks may well save German language someday. Here's why.

German knows four cases of which the genitive is dying. That case disappeared from English almost entirely a long time ago. The genitive's strong survivor in English is asking "whose". Many Germans talk aroung the genitive using constructs similar to "the car of my father" rather than saying "my father's" car.

Turkish has more cases than German including a genitive. Turkish cannot dump the genitive and talk around it with the help of prepositions ( such as "of" or "from") because Turkish does not know any prepositions. With Turkish it is "the genitive way or the highway".

If there's anyone out there saving the genitive and proper German it will be the Turks of all people. That is provided they go to the same schools as everbody else.

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